The Jaguar and the Little Skunk
by Peregrine
Summary: A quick fic inspired by a Peruvian folktale - Blair gains some disturbing insights into the nature of Sentinels and Guides.


Disclaimer:- Not mine sadly, and tragically never will be so the likelihood of making profit out of this is nonexistent. Tragic but true!

Notes:- This is inspired by an actual Mayan folktale I found whilst rummaging online. The ficlet is based around an early season 2 Blair and the folktale (which you can see here:-

Enjoy!

The Jaguar and the Little Skunk

Research reading. It was something that seemed endless, random, and as frustrating as panning for grains of gold in the sludge of some murky river of information. All around him, books lay half open, their marked pages constantly in danger of springing shut, journals and papers covered with yellow memos telling him to remember to get a copy of this section, or search out a bibliography- or even in one stray instance to pick up some milk and the dry cleaning before meeting Jim at the office.

Blair reached over to that one and plucked it off the book with a faint smile of amusement at the evidence of his organized chaos method of working. Yeah, that would look good in his dissertation as a footnote. Reference 123, that well known anthropological tract, Jim, Milk and the Drycleaned Court Suit by E-zee Clean Drycleaners and K-mart et al. He looked at it a moment and then the clock, before deciding he had time to fit a little more studying in before he set off on errands. A brief hesitation later and he stuck the yellow memo to his arm just in case it decided to leap headlong into the maelstrom of academic mayhem he had created in the middle of the Loft.

"Better clean it up man." he chastised himself shaking his head. "Or risk it ending up in the garbage.." 

Most likely the offended Sentinel would dump the lot of it in his room. In the middle of his bed so he'd have to put them away or take the usual option of dumping everything off onto the floor when he crashed out for some sleep. Sometimes he'd find his textbooks neatly stacked there in piles leaning against each in a strange shaky looking ziggurat shape. It always made him think frivolously that maybe Jim was responding to internal Peruvian symbolism or something, but the one time he'd rather enthusiastically expounded this theory - whilst waving a beer around - he'd been on the receiving end of a artic blue patented Ellison Look and a "Is the weather nice on whatever planet you're on Chief?" comment.

Hastily, he piled the books up neatly, marking the pages as he went, until the place was reasonable enough to pass a cursory glance even by a Sentinel and then checking the time again he decided he only had time now to run through something short. 

So..the Slush Pile. He look around for his folder of a large collection of random folklore, myths, legends, snippets of articles trawled from all over the place for sorting into categories from relevant all the way through to, wow man, that theory came off of the back of a cereal box and has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Which reminded him, he was getting hungry - cereal and cheese? Nah, maybe best to leave that little thought bunny well alone. Jim would probably insist on going out for dinner anyway as it was his turn to cook. He could wait. Back to work. Since their experiences in Peru going after Simon, Jim might not have thought much of the fact he had told him about seeing the black jaguar but that had been like, wow , breakthrough city man!. A direct link to the original sentinel mythology and to who knew what else? The problem was the whole of that area was saturated in Jaguar related myths, folktales and tall stories from every single era. From the Olmecs, Mayan's ,Toltecs, and Aztecs as well as the tribal traditions of the Shuar and Jivaro. So, he had been scouring all he could find, no matter how ridiculous and seeing if any contained seeds of information from which Sentinel theories could be grown in his fertile imagination.

Pushing his hair back absently into a tie, and ignoring the wisps that curled free as he leaned forward, he picked up the next print out from the folder and gave a little chuckle aloud as he read the title. It wasn't even a page long, but he'd obviously printed it out because of the title. "The Jaguar and the Skunk." and that fact it was meant to have a Mayan origin.

"Yeah, I know which one Jim would call me." he said to the room as he settled back on the couch indulging in his habit of talking to himself as there was no hyper sensed room mate to complain. Part of living with someone who could smell as acutely as a Sentinel meant having to put up with the occasional subtle comment such as "Sandburg you _stink_! Use the damn shower!" if he came back from a night out in a bar at Rainer, ripe with the smell of smoke, alcohol and people.

Hey, perhaps a streak of white in the middle of his hair might help things, or if it turned out to be a comedy tale he could give Jim a laugh by leaving it around and telling him he had plans to change his name to Pepe or something. Jim needed to seriously lighten up at the moment, or he'd bust a vein or something. One day he might get lockjaw from the way he exercised that muscle there when he was tense, and he'd be trying to drink pureed wonderburger through a straw or something. Anyway...

He sipped at his cold-by-now herbal tea and grimaced a little as he lifted a pen to annotate notes in the double spaced print out. So then.. The Tale of the Jaguar and the Skunk..

"Once there was a gentleman jaguar and a lady skunk. Mrs. Skunk had a son, who was baptized by Mr. Jaguar, so Mrs. Skunk became his comadre. And as Mr. Jaguar had baptized the little skunk, he was Mrs. Skunk's compadre. " 

Blair read to himself and started jotting notes. 'Evidence of catholicised original folktale, but Jaguar still present as authority figure and responsible for spiritual/physical protection' he jotted down in neat handwriting and considered the opening. Interesting, maybe it could have a(an) element of the Sentinel myth buried in there. Jim as a Jaguar of course, making the Jaguar a sentinel figure - or at the very least some sort of noble warrior. But there was no way he was identifying himself with Mrs. Skunk thank you very much. Perhaps the son. But that would make Naomi a skunk too and she'd _love_ that. A sage eating spiritually clean skunk of course. Amused he tapped his pen and continued reading.

'Mr. Jaguar decided to go looking for food and came to Mrs. Skunk's house. "Well, compadre, what are you looking for? What have you come here for?" the skunk asked the jaguar.

"Comadre, what I have come to do is to look for some food," said Mr. Jaguar.

"Oh," said Mrs. Skunk.'

"We've got nothing in the fridge man, order some pizza - but make sure it's organic." Blair commented to the story even as he wrote 'Jaguar as provider, coming in from outside but exhibiting need for contact? Skunk as tribe? Possible. Mayan matriarchal theme as tribal continuity?'

"I want my godson to come with me so that he can learn to hunt," said Mr. Jaguar. 

"I don't think your godson ought to go; he's still very small and something could happen to him. He better not go, compadre," said Mrs. Skunk.

But the little skunk protested: "No, mother, I had better go. What my godfather says is true. I need to get some practice, if I'm going to learn to hunt," said the little skunk.

"But if you go, you'll be so far away," said Mrs. Skunk. 

"I'm going, I'm going. Come on, let's go." So they set off on a long walk. 

"We're going to where there's a river. That's where we're going," Mr. Jaguar explained to the little skunk, his godson.

That was definitely Naomi. Oh yes - 'He's still very small and something could happen to him'? The amount of times he'd heard that as a reason why he was left to stay with some friend or other when she went off to a distant retreat. And, yeah that sounded like him when he had gone to Rainer so early saying, hey, yeah I've got to grow up sometime - I can cope. Big wide world and all that Mom, got to face it sometime...except he hadn't had a Jaguar then had he? No Jim, just him being an overly bright kid facing college too early and too alone.

He tapped his pen a little more and then noted down his thoughts in a slightly more objective fashion. 'Jaguar as a mentor protector figure provider for the tribe? Having an existence separate from the tribe. Definite Sentinel parallel. Close connection with limited amount of others. Generalized obligations kept at distance. Long walk, possibly Journey in a more spiritual sense?'. 

It made a weird kind of sense; Jim was always somewhat distant but he did seem to crave that connection as well. Why else would he have allowed a grad student like him into his personal space and more to the point let him stay way past that 'just one week'? The comparison didn't seem so different. Jim the Jaguar - lean, capable tough and wise in the ways of the harshness of existence, mentoring Blair the ...uh ... little Skunk.

"Yeah, just called me Pepe le Peu, Jim." Blair said with heavy exhalation that bordered on a sigh. Man, it was depressing sometimes. Anthropologist Blair would be in raptures about the Sentinel responding to genetic archetypes, but underneath it the Blair who had to be there and experience whilst his observer self sat back and this Blair was all too aware of his own inadequacies compared to the incredibly capable Jim Ellison. Not that he didn't know his way around some things - man, if it was him versus Jim in the realms of academia he'd whup Jim's ass and they both knew it. But they weren't on Blair's territory, they were in Jim's and sometimes it was hard to keep up with a bonafide everyday hero. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that heroism was never something that the person being heroic experienced so they never really knew or thought that was what they were doing. Pretty much all they got was fear, adrenalin and blind instinctive panic. Maybe that was a concept worth noting down for the dissertation. Sentinels were very much tribal heroes and if they existed in a constant internal fear and alert then how would that affect them? Jim didn't seem like that on the outside but it was possible to bottle fear down so tight it sank like a proverbial stone inside. But it was still there, and all your other thoughts built themselves upon using it as a foundation more solid than..human contact.

Blair raised his eyebrow at the pensive turn his thoughts had taken and scribbled a note on another piece of paper about 'fear based responses' and continued reading.

"When are we going to get there?" asked the little skunk. 

"We're getting close. Follow me so you won't get lost," said Mr. Jaguar. 

"All right," answered the little skunk. They finally came to the river. 

"This is where we're going to eat," said Mr. Jaguar to the little skunk. 

"All right," said the little skunk.

"Come on over here. I'm going to sharpen my knife," said Mr. Jaguar. "All right," said the little skunk, looking at his godfather. Mr. Jaguar sharpened his claws, which he called his "knife."

'Or his police issue gun." Blair muttered, barely audible even to himself. "Jaguars having weapons...protectors theme..yadda yadda.." . Did he sound like that ? 'All right' said the little skunk. It might as well be "Yes Jim" said the longhaired anthropology student police observer. Actually Skunk was shorter and could probably be bellowed with satisfying fervour. Maybe he wouldn't mention this to Jim in case he acquired it as a new nickname that might replace Chief. Chief had a much better sound to it.

"I sharpened my knife. Now you're going to be on guard, because I am going to sleep. When you see them come, wake me up," said Mr. Jaguar.

"All right," said the little skunk, "all right, godfather." Then Mr. Jaguar told him: "Don't shout. Just scratch my belly when they come. Scratch my belly, so I won't alarm them. But don't wake me up if just any little old animals without antlers come along, only when the one with big antlers gets here. That's when you'll wake me up."

"All right," said the little skunk. Then the one with the big antlers came, and the skunk awakened Mr. Jaguar. He scratched his belly, and pointed out the deer to Mr. Jaguar, who attacked the animal with big antlers. He went after him and seized him.

Blair sat up a little at that and paused thinking hard before he began scribbling rapidly, his thoughts flying. 'Why does the Jaguar need someone to be on guard for him? Someone not a warrior? To help him get the prey he hunts? Discrimination of prey - only prey worthy of note to be brought to the Jaguar's attention? Suggestion of touch to be used as a means of bringing a Jaguar to awareness. Jaguar takes prey easily by not working completely alone but not within the Tribe.'

He paused a moment again as idea's bounced around his head over excited in their enthusiasm to make themselves heard. Whoa, Sentinel and partner stuff. Had to be. The isolation with the Jaguar spirit was something marked as special in all the South American cultures, not for the normal hunter or warrior. And there was even a practical cue there on how to raise a sleeping Jaguar warrior. Was that sleep, sleep or a representation of a zone? Wow, scratching the jaguars belly, not shouting or anything over stimulating.

He mentally rehearsed a stray comment that popped into his mind. 'Hey Jim, got another idea for a test here.. Next time you zone I'm going to try bringing you around by scratching your belly. How about it?...what? Yeah sure Jim, I'll be packed and out in a few minutes.."

Oh yeah. Fantastic idea Sandburg. Go to the front of the class and hand out the pencils, if you can do that with broken arms or something. He snorted to himself.

Mind you, if touch was so grounding to a Jaguar maybe he could be aware of that in the field. It was true enough that Jim didn't often zone out on touch, it was usually sight or sound.. And it was consistent with the concepts in Burton's monograph about the back up native - the Guide, as he'd started to refer to him or himself after that deal with Brackett. In a bizarre way it could relate to Jim and him though. He watched out for Jim whilst he did his work, and on the surface what a mismatch! Jaguar and Skunk and then some!. People wouldn't believe that someone like Jim needed his help - hell, half the time _he_ didn't believe it.. Didn't seem like it did it from the outside did it but though they never really made a big deal about it between the two of them, he _had_ helped. With zones, with cases, with...whatever whilst still appearing nothing unusual next to Jim and his record. Just a longhaired student tagalong and occasional target for the bad guys.

"All right, my godson, let's eat. We're going to eat meat," said the jaguar. 

"All right," said the little skunk. 

And so they ate and ate. "Now we're going to take whatever leftovers there are to your mother," said the jaguar. "Since we are full, we can take something to your mother. Your mother will have meat to eat, just as we did. We will take some to your mother," said the jaguar. When they came back to the mother's house, he told the lady:

"Look at the food here. Look, we've brought you some food, the food that we hunted. Eat your fill of the meat, comadre," the jaguar said to Mrs. Skunk.

"All right," said the skunk, and ate the meat. "I'm full," she said. 

"It's good that you're satisfied. I've seen that you are, so I'll be leaving now," said Mr. Jaguar to Mrs. Skunk. And so he left. 

Okay, that bit was easy...though an interesting inference there. The Jaguar provided for the young Skunk first. He smiled a little to himself and looked around the Loft. Yeah, couldn't argue with that one either, this neo-hippy witch doctor ..Skunk was well provided for one way or another. His pen scribbled hastily, more convinced now this doggerel folktale might be drawing on some Sentinel roots. 'Jaguar as provider for the Tribe. Interesting that priority could be Guide then Tribe if connection sustained. Partnership successful. Follows the classic tribal of criteria of success of hunting enough for more than self and enough to sustain others. Jaguar returns to patrolling the perimeter?'. 

The tale was obviously building up to the point of the whole thing which was presumably about what? Cooperation bringing prosperity to the tribe? A Sentinel and Guide pair leading to dominance over lesser tribes? Well, there was one way to find out...

After the jaguar left, the little skunk stayed with his mother. 

"Hey...hey...no way!" Blair found himself protesting aloud into the quietness of the Loft and shut up, embarrassed at that emotional reaction even if there were no-one to hear it. His pen doodled the words "Theme - Separation" and then underlined it absently with rather harsh strokes. That was not what he had been expecting. Not at all.

When they ran out of meat, Mrs. Skunk said to her son: "Dear, our meat is all gone." 

"Yes, the meat is all gone. I better go and get us some more food," said the little skunk.

"How can you, son? Do you think you're big enough? You're very small. Don't you think you'll be killed?" asked Mrs. Skunk.

"No, mother, I already know how to hunt, my godfather taught me how," replied the little skunk. "I'm leaving now."

He left, and Mrs. Skunk was very worried.

Okay. So the Skunk and Jaguar were no longer an item if you wanted it to put it like that, and the implication was that the abundance that had been with the Tribe failed as a result. Was this a warning to the Skunk to not leave the Tribe or not to leave the Sentinel. No, damn, not the Skunk, the Guide figure. Or that if the Sentinel was not there then his back up would have to take his place? Or that he shouldn't? Blair felt a distinct unease at the turn this harmless folktale was taking. Which was ridiculous of course because it was just a folktale, and an anglicized catholisced version distortion at that.

Her son came once more to the river, the place to which he had come with his godfather to get the meat.

"This is how my godfather did it. Why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing?" said the little skunk. "This is how you sharpen a knife," said the little skunk. He sharpened his "knife." 

"This is the way my godfather did it. I'm not going to hunt the little animals; I'm just going to hunt the one with the great big antlers. I'm going to hunt one for myself just like the one I ate with my godfather. I have my knife here and I'm going to sleep for a little while." The little skunk lay down to sleep, but then he awakened. He was waiting for the one with the big antlers, and when he came, he attacked him, thinking he was as strong as his godfather.

Blair paused again, pen poised and wrote deliberately 'Skunks cannot be Jaguars.' slowly next to that section. Stupid really, he should have just written, 'Guides cannot hope to be Sentinels' there and be done with it. His reactionary side ran a brief scenario of placards waving angrily demanding equal rights for Guides and Skunks but somehow he decided he would be a protest group of one there. Still, the next time he was left behind, or told to stay put, he'd entertain himself with a little mental protest rally if nothing else. Him and a few thousand skunks picketing Major Crimes. He looked suspiciously at his cold herbal tea just in case that idea was not a result of an over active brain before forcing himself to settle down a little.

Why was the Jaguar not there? He couldn't help but turn back to that point - it tugged at him, worried at him. What would lure a Jaguar away so that it would leave the Tribe unprotected? He doodled on the side of the paper a moment in the fine black pen before writing 'Primal instincts?". The only time he'd seen Jim take his mind from work was during that incident with Laura. Man, Jim got a whiff of pheromones and - bam! - attention diverted big time. So whilst the Jaguar plays.. the Guide is left vulnerable...and through the Guide, the Tribe. There was only one paragraph left to read and he just knew that the little Skunk wasn't going to be bringing back any food for the Tribe no matter how hard he tried. That was depressing really and he should know better than to empathize too much with story characters, but he knew that he was like that little Skunk. He'd try to help, he'd try to protect the Tribe even though that wasn't strictly his job because of the fact he had worked with Jim and had lost his tolerance to standing idly by. Dead bodies, kidnappings and close calls made peril more personal somehow. He'd hunted with the Jaguar and it had changed him for all the fact he was only an observer, not meant to be involved.

Still, it was just a folktale. He'd finish this paragraph and then go off and meet Jim and maybe wind him up about skunks or something. His eyes, darkened with thought, turned to the final paragraph.

But he just hung from the neck of the one with big antlers. His claws had dug into his skin. He was hanging from his neck and was carried far away and fell on his back. He was left with his mouth wide open.

Since he had not come home to his mother, she wondered:

"What could have happened to my son? Why hasn't he come back yet? Something must have happened to him. I better go and look for him."

And so Mrs. Skunk went as far as the bank of the river. She was looking everywhere for her son, but couldn't find him. She began to cry when she found the tracks where the one with the big antlers had come by running. 

"They must have come by here," said Mrs. Skunk, and began to follow the tracks. She came to the place where her son had been left lying on his back. When the mother caught sight of him, she noticed that his teeth were showing and shouted at him:

"Son, what are you laughing at? All your teeth are showing," she said to him before she had gotten very close. When she did get close she told him:

"Give me your hand. I've come to get you, but you're just laughing in my face." She put her hand on him, thinking that he was still alive, but when she noticed that he was already dead, she began to cry. 

The clatter on the floor told him he had dropped his pen as he finished reading the last sentence, a ghost of a premonitionary chill having passed through him, prickling his body with shock and unease.

Damn these Peruvian folktales. Every time he read them, their sudden brutal twists metaphorically punched him in the gut. No way. He wasn't expecting Disney but what sort of message was that sending? Not exactly a happy type of moral was it? Get close to a Jaguar and they'll abandon you and you'll die? No way. No way man, that wouldn't happen! 

Or, Jaguar distracted and the Guide gets killed? 

Or that there will be one day when they don't come to the rescue of the one who watched over them and helped them and... 

Or that he was just stupid taking all these risks and deluding himself that he might just be measuring up in someway because if he was really put to the test he would end up dying...

No. No, Jim wouldn't do that. He wouldn't - just wouldn't - leave him. He wouldn't abandon the person who helped him, and he wasn't trying to be a Sentinel was he? Nuh-uh, wouldn't wish that on anyone, not seeing how Jim struggled even with his help to cope with the day-to-day torments of a society designed to over stimulate the senses for thrills.

He stared at the story again trying to ignore the fact that he was being a big wuss and the piece of paper was trembling ever so slightly from a miniscule shake in his hands. Ever so tiny. Wouldn't show up on any emotional Richter scale if anyone was there to measure it. Interpretations aside there was one fact that hammered over and over in his head if he took this little snippet as a Sentinel based tale despite his attempts to rationalize over the top of the message.

The Guide dies alone.

He had two choices. Believe in the evidence and inference he had just scrawled in black and white next to orderly type and take the warning. Run like hell. Drop Jim, get the hell out of Dodge or whatever...and survive.

Or deny it. It's just a piece of Peruvian folk history. A doggerel tale not about Sentinels and Guides but about knowing your own nature and not trying to be something you are not...and stay.

The paper was suddenly and decisively screwed up into a ball, with thorough intent, and Blair threw it in the direction of the waste bin, whilst checking his watch. "Man, I'm going to be late! Jim is going to kill me!" he announced breaking that thick silence that had cocooned him. In a flurry of movement, hair escaping the loose tie as he grabbed his jacket he fled the Loft to meet Jim at the comparative sanctuary of Major Crimes.

And in the shadows, behind the waste bin where it had fallen, the tight paper bud of a future uncrinkled and blossomed unseen.  



End file.
